Is there evidence to suggest the CIA didn't want Reagan to end the Cold War?
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CDR David G. Muller, Jr., USN (Ret.) -- an intelligence specialist with the Navy and the CIA, discusses this, to an extent, in his recent memoir, "Knowing the Enemy: An Intelligence Officer's Memoir 1966-2014." (Note, I served under CDR Muller in the mid-1980s.) CDR Muller states that intelligence gathering long focused on the Soviet Union, to the exclusion of other countries -- especially within the Naval Intelligence community -- because the Pentagon needed intelligence about the Soviet threat to justify to Congress the need to appropriate money for bigger and better weapons. Intelligence reports on the Far East, or elsewhere, was in high demand by the tactical commands, such as Pacific Command, or Sixth Fleet, for example, were more likely to have to invade or intervene in wars against less-capable enemies (e.g. Libya or Syria), or terrorists threats. Nevertheless, as I understood his book to say, the CIA was completely on board with Reagan's plan to out-spend the Soviets on weapons purchases, and bankrupt the regime by forcing it to keep up its defense spending. Although Muller does not address that Reagan's "Star Wars" program, which other analysts have said was a bluff, CDR Muller once told me that he was pleased that novelist Tom Clancey had, at times, exaggerated the capabilities of US intelligence gathering and weapons technology -- "let the Russians try to replicate that capability -- they will go broke doing so," he said with regard to another area of technology that I cannot discuss further.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Muller writes that the intelligence agencies finally turned to spend resources on intelligence gathering on other threats -- something he had campaigned for since the late 1970s.
The Pentagon, unfortunately, determined that the end of the Cold War and the deterioration of the Russian/Soviet Navy and other armed services, meant that scores of relatively new destroyers and submarines would be sunk or (in the case of nuclear-powered ships and submarines, dismantled and recycled) well before the end of their service lifespan. The option to mothball the vessels and preserving them for later needs was rejected as unnecessary and too expensive (plus upgrading the older ships would mean less new construction).
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